How to Make Poor Kids $1 Million Richer

April 27 (Bloomberg) -- Anyone with half a brain knows that
bolstering the middle class is critical to securing the future
of the U.S. It’s a matter of national self-interest.

Setting aside the misery of poverty for a minute, the rich
need a skilled middle-class workforce to make their businesses
successful or they won’t stay rich for long.

Skills, of course, require education, which is why it’s
nutty that Republican House members want to cut Pell grants and
are making unreasonable demands in the debate over preventing
the federal interest rate on student loans from shooting up. But
conservatives have a point that a lot of federal support goes to
students who don’t finish community college.

We need to move faster to improve these schools. They
aren’t Harvard -- and they might not be sexy to talk about on
the campaign trail -- but they make up a growing share of the
college market. And nowadays they are the primary engine
powering people into the middle class.

Unfortunately, these institutions are often failing. The
overall graduation rate for two-year community colleges
(measured after six years from entrance) is only about 25
percent. In Chicago, it’s a pathetic 10 percent, which led Mayor
Rahm Emanuel to blow up the system and turn over much of the
curriculum to local employers looking to train workers in health
care, hospitality and the like. He explained to me recently that
the city has an unemployment rate of close to 10 percent and
100,000 job vacancies because not enough people are trained. If
he can’t fix the community colleges, he can’t fix Chicago.

Value of Degrees

Even the good programs have trouble achieving graduation
rates of more than 50 percent. Part of the problem is that we
haven’t marketed the value of a degree properly to families
where no one has gone to college. They need to know that
unemployment for college graduates is about 4 percent, compared
with about 9 percent for those with only high-school educations.

Graduates with even a two-year degree earn almost one-third
more a year on average. If they manage to get a four-year
degree, their lifetime earnings will be about $1 million higher
than if they only finish high school, a point that should go on
billboards. (“Want a Million Bucks? Finish College.”)

There are lots of reasons students don’t finish, most of
which have to do with money (note the importance of Pell grants)
and family issues. The biggest problem is that two-thirds of
those headed for college graduate from high school without basic
reading, writing and math skills. According to Education
Department research, the rigor of a high school’s academic
program is a better predictor of college graduation than race,
family income or level of parent education.

When students arrive at community college, they encounter
remedial programs that are often taught horribly by professors
who don’t want to be there.

“The assessment system is broken, and the curriculum out of
date,” says Undersecretary of Education Martha Kanter, who ran a
large and successful community-college system in California.
“Remediation is in the 18th century.”

Kanter has started an aggressive community-college
completion agenda that includes gathering basic data on how
students are prepared in high school; setting college-completion
goals; making it easier to transfer credits; reducing college
costs to stabilize tuition growth; and other initiatives. But
the Education Department’s College Completion Tool Kit is
missing a critical strategy: overhauling the community-college
guidance system.

If we are to transform these colleges (and thus save the
middle class) we must rethink a guidance system that often has a
ratio of one counselor for every 1,000 students, according to
Kanter. No wonder so many students slip through the cracks and
drop out.

Preposterous ‘Professionalism’

Why do we have this preposterous system? Because academic
“professionalism” has run amok. Guidance has developed into a
specialty that requires significant training. This is necessary
for dealing with troubled kids and specialized career
counseling. But most students just need a faculty member on
campus to connect with on their academic program and get
referred somewhere if they need more help. Training faculty in
such skills could be done in a couple of days.

Instead, many parts of the country have unionized
community-college systems, which means any effort to ask
teachers to serve as advisers (the tradition in private high
schools and colleges) must become subject to collective
bargaining.

“For community colleges that are unionized, you’d have to
negotiate,” Kanter says. The unions, she argues, would say the
faculty’s not qualified. “I disagree. Anyone in the institution
should help students negotiate personal and institutional
barriers.”

Kanter is saying the right things about guidance. But she
and her boss, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, need to challenge
the faculty and guidance-counselor unions just as they have
teachers’ unions in elementary and secondary education.

They need to make clear to community-college presidents
that it’s all hands on deck -- every faculty member at every
institution must be engaged in the vital work of keeping
students in school. Otherwise, we’re all going down together.

(Jonathan Alter is a Bloomberg View columnist and the
author of “The Promise: President Obama, Year One.” The opinions
expressed are his own.)